Mother Dearest
by devilberry
Summary: "He got away from this. He escaped the endless cycle of black hearts and cold stares. He finally managed to remove himself from the serpent's grasp, and put himself someplace warm." Walburga dissects the Black family and realizes that maybe she wasn't such an awful parent.


_I am so madly in love with the Black family dynamic. Fucked up families produce fucked up children who produce fucked up families. _

_I'm trying to play around more and more with the Marauders, specifically the darker bits of them. Enjoy~_

* * *

Walburga looks to the Black Family Tree and silently begs it to tell her where she went wrong. The answer to her problem must be here amidst these tangled branches.

She was a good mother. She had to be. She raised her boys just as her mother raised her, with tight lips and sharp insults and curt discipline. She held their hands when it was proper (not often) and had the house elves read to them and she cared for them. Perhaps a bit more than she should have. And maybe that's where she messed up.

She remembers when Sirius was born, she was afraid of him. Never in her life had anything made her feel so…_warm_. His face was so small and white and she could hold all of him in her two hands if she wasn't so scared. She didnn't know what to do.

_Just leave it,_ Mother says, _the house elves will make sure it stays fed. It should live._

Walburga wanted to correct her mother. Say _him, not **it**,_ because it is a he and she made the little boy and he's perfect. But she never did.

Instead, she handed her baby off to Kreacher and told the elf to take look after him. Actually, she didn't even hand him off. Orion did. She just couldn't _touch _him.

She should've seen it coming, just by the power the boy had over her. She was so afraid to care about this child that her hands shook when she looked at him. She wanted to hold him. She wanted to press him close, right against her collarbone, so he could hear the sound of a beating in her chest. She just wanted him to know that it was _there._

_I promise I have a heart,_ she would whisper into his crib (cage), _I've just been told that I shouldn't use it._

(She remembers being small and sitting in Mother's bedroom. Mother was penciling liner to her eyelids and insuring her lips to be a perfectly harsh shade of crimson. _How did you and Daddy fall in love? _Walburga asks, little girl eyes wide and body twisted and jumpy. She idly puts her fingers to Mother's comforter and tries to find warmth there. She doesn't. _You call him "Father," girl._ Mother snaps, smacking the chubby hands from their hiding spot. _And we never fell in love. It was only out of convenience. _She cards a brush through her long long dark hair, pulling it back into a tight bun. _Love is a weakness, dear, never forget that.)_

Putting her fingers to the lush leaves and twirling branches, Walburga sighs. Maybe that was her problem; she never had the guts to hate her mother like Sirius had to hate her.

It started at a young age, she supposes, it had to. She deserved to be hated for pushing her son into the hands of some lesser being—a _monster_, really. Kreacher gave the baby what he needed, but just barely, muttering useless words to it.

Sirius' first word was "brat." Because that's what Kreacher called him. Bratbratbrat. The word seemed odd on his baby lips, and the sight of his chubby face all lit up as he'd squeal _bwat bwat bwat_ at his mother as she passed was heartbreaking to say the least.

His body grew, as did her tolerance for him. By age two, her desire to hold him close and love him was almost entirely gone. He could walk and talk and create chaos, so she could yell and scream and scold him. She should've seen it coming, because this whole story was already written into his bright, wicked silver eyes. He probably spent longer locked in his bedroom than he did in his own mother's presence.

His fists would slam against the wall, and he'd cry, and she knew he'd only do it for the attention because she did the same. (Though she remembers _desperately _wanting that attention. She remembers yearning for it, as though her entire heart and soul depended on her mother coming in to check on her. She never did, and her heart and soul never made it through the experience the same.)

When she would let him out of his room hours later, only so that he could eat dinner, of course, she smiled. She could feel her lips stretch impossibly thin across her mouth and it probably looked like there was nothing to them but a near-invisible drip of red around her teeth. She would smirk, setting him in his chair. _You shouldn't cry like that, it makes you sound ridiculous_, and she'd dare to let a ghosty breath pass her lips, something that could be mistaken for laughter, just so he really knew that she was mocking him.

He mentions this when he storms out on that day. Her laugh. _I would fucking sob in my room for hours and you'd laugh at me for it, you heartless bitch._ And she just smiles and tries not to chuckle as he slams the front door behind him.

She should've seen it coming really. Because she couldn't keep the grin off her face from the time that door closed to when she marched up the stairs and cursed _Sirius Black _from his spot on the Family Tree.

She thought the charred black mark on the wall would be an eyesore when she made it. She'd seen other names charred off, odd relatives and crooked faces torn from existence with a simple flick of a wand. Their scars look ugly on the walls of Grimmauld Place.

Sirius' black spot looks perfect. Fitting, somehow.

She takes a few moments to admire it before she allows herself to walk into her eldest son's bedroom. She takes in the sights around her—the posters of Muggle cars and half naked Muggle girls, frozen in time, smiling brightly down at what used to be her child. She sees the picture that Sirius stuck to the wall about a year ago, Permanent Sticking Charm, and really _looks _at it. The four little boys, lined up in a row, arms around one another. And they're all _smiling_. Walburga has never seen anyone smile like that before in her life. It's so young and honest and bright. There's nothing cruel in their lips and nothing evil in the lines around their mouths. They just look _happy._

She realizes that her son is running away to stay with one of these boys. With one of his friends. He got away from this. He escaped the endless cycle of black hearts and cold stares. He finally managed to remove himself from the serpent's grasp, and put himself someplace warm. Someplace with boys like these, where everyone smiles and it doesn't taste false and poisonous. She thinks of Sirius as a baby, and how she was too afraid to hold him. She thinks that now, as an adult, he can maybe be happy.

She finally stops smiling and allows herself to openly sob.

The tears collecting in her hands are stained black from the make-up surrounding her dark eyes, and she know that she never could have seen this coming.


End file.
